Our family is hosting an 8th grade foreign exchange student. Our visitor loves soccer, and we could be ardent American sports imperialists; fortunately, we’re casual watchers who boast no fanatical hoopla. While we have scheduled a variety of south Louisiana activities, from the obligatory swamp tour to festivals galore, our discovery process began with our guest’s likes, namely The Walking Dead, which incidentally we’ve never watched.
Why start with our visitor’s interests? For most of the 20th century, education was built upon a medical model (much of it still is): diagnose a problem and prescribe a cure. Despite advocates from Montessori to Vygotsky, only recently have educators focused more intimately on the learner to foster successes. Learning about our visitor’s likes and dislikes, rather than imposing our own predilections, is pivotal to cultivating a positive, meaningful experience for all. A fulfilling experience depends on what motivates her. Similarly, what’s crucial to workplace engagement is what motivates each employee.
We need our guest to help us discover how to shape her engagement or, to paraphrase Kevin Kruse and Hogan Associates, to create a psychological state embodied in positive, meaningful involvement, where potential is maximized and where pride of membership is demonstrated through initiative, purpose, energy, discretionary effort, and persistence. Our household is aiming for better success than the 1 in 3 engagement rate commonly found in the workplace, where rather than engaged workers, employers have created a cottage industry—some might argue McSubdivisions of engagement consulting firms.
Our immersion efforts are, like the workplace, a cultural enterprise. Classical definitions by Edward Hall and Enrique Trueba emphasize that culture is “revealed in what people do” and “transmitted by communication.” Not surprisingly, one of the universal and reciprocal descriptors of culture, communication, also positively moves the engagement needle. Language theory refers to “received standards” or how well, contextually and in time, words work through formal or informal discourse.
In the workplace, for example, timely welcoming of ideas and suggestions is pivotal to ownership and better executed initiatives. Or, for instance, when and how groups are asked to construct values, vision, and mission, the execution of which affects the depth of conviction and relevance of team members, or conversely, employee silence as evidenced when pointing at the un-memorized posting of the company’s mission statement.
At home, during our first cross-cultural dinner, delicately avoiding the topic of eating brains, our conversation centered around the social implications of The Walking Dead—specifically, how individuals and groups act under extreme circumstances, a quandary that Gallup among others suggest also applies to workplace engagement. The television series writers may turn the tide in the living’s favor.
The next installments of this series will focus on workplace scripts that can turn the cultural wave of our “walking dead,” the disengaged merely in quest of devouring a paycheck. To be sure, disengagement is not a disease to be cured. The zombies have a heartbeat. The question is: “Are we feeling the pulse?”
